Poor Quality Drugs and Global Trade: A Pilot Study - NBER.org

Read the rest of the abstract: Poor Quality Drugs and Global Trade: A Pilot Study - NBER.org:

"Experts claim that some Indian drug manufacturers cut corners and make substandard drugs for markets with non-existent, under-developed or emerging regulatory oversight, notably Africa. This paper assesses the quality of 1470 antibiotic and tuberculosis drug samples that claim to be made in India and were sold in Africa, India, and five mid-income non-African countries. We find that 10.9% of those products fail a basic assessment of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), and the majority of the failures are substandard (7%) as they contain some correct API but the amount of API is under-dosed. The distribution of these substandard products is not random: they are more likely to be found as unregistered products in Africa than in India or non-African countries."

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Read the study paper:
Poor Quality Drugs and Global Trade: A Pilot Study (Roger Bate, Ginger Zhe Jin, Aparna Mathur, Amir Attaran). NBER Working Paper No. 20469. Issued in September 2014 (PDF)

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FDA Abroad - Pharmaceutical Executive

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Updated June 4, 2025

Sadly, the original link broke.

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Read the full article: FDA Abroad - Pharmaceutical Executive:

"In India, America's second largest global source of API and finished drug products, some 1,965 manufacturing facilities export to the US, but only around 600 sites are registered with CDER, said Atul Agrawal, supervisory consumer safety officer at FDA's India office. Drug manufacturing capability in India doubled to represent 12% of total US drug imports in 2012, up from 6% in 2008. "India is a major player in the prescription drugs Americans take on a daily basis," said Agrawal, much to the envy of Chinese nationals everywhere. And yet, FDA's operation in India currently consists of five full-time Americans, and two locally employed staffers, spread across two offices, one in New Delhi and one in Mumbai."

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FDA Gets EC Waiver To Export APIs

Press Announcements > FDA obtains waiver from European Commission to facilitate export for U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturers:

" . . . the U.S. is now a “listed” country with the European Commission (EC) so that U.S. companies need not obtain an export certificate from the FDA before shipping certain pharmaceutical products to Europe.

Without the waiver, all U.S. companies shipping active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) to Europe after July 1, 2013 would have had to first submit documentation from the FDA that the product was manufactured in accordance with Europe’s good manufacturing practices."

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